OS X Mavericks: Safari, Security, Syncing

Pros

Powerful yet unobtrusive notification panel that includes iMessage sending.
Tight integration with iOS 7.
Clean, convenient UI.
New power-management and security features.
Intuitive new features like a tabbed Finder and color-coded tags.
Maps and iBooks give OS X nearly all the features of iOS.

Cons

Minor inconsistencies in deep features like keyboard shortcuts.
New color-coded tag feature lacks some conveniences.

Bottom Line

OS X remains the best consumer-level desktop operating system, despite Microsoft's impressive catch-up in Windows 8.1.
Newly included apps, automatic app updates, better laptop power management, tight integration with social media, and unified notifications are just a few of Mavericks' highlights.

23 Oct 2013

If you've read our reviews of earlier versions of OS X, this is the first that doesn't complain about the silly realistic-looking torn paper edges on the Calendar and the false-leather covers on the Contacts address book. Apple finally got rid of these "skeuomorphic" distractions in OS X, just as it did in iOS 7. I hope Apple someday drops a few other pointlessly realistic-looking interface effects like the shiny red, green, and yellow buttons at the top left of every window and the gradient effects on menu bars. They were fun to look at for the first few years of OS X, but now they're merely distracting.

Safari Made Better

Some familiar apps have unexpected improvements. Safari's sidebar, for example, now lets you scroll through all the pages that you've added to the sidebar reading list—just use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll up and down through each page as you normally do, then swipe twice at the foot of a page to scroll down to the next—believe, me, it's easier to do than it sounds. I wish, however, that Apple would let me do the same trick when I use the cursor and scrollbar to move through a page instead of swiping with two fingers; it's one of the places where you expect the interface to be more consistent than it is.

Social-networking addicts get shared links from your LinkedIn connections and people you follow on Twitter, with a button to retweet a link when you see it in the sidebar. An under-the-hood improvement makes Safari run each open page in a separate process, so a slow download on one page won't slow down everything else. This was a major annoyance in older Safari versions, but it's now gone.

Security and Syncing

If you've been using a third-party app to store your Web passwords and credit card data, take a look at Mavericks' built-in iCloud Keychain. This saves your passwords to all your iOS and OS X devices, offers to generate strong passwords, and protects everything with 256-bit AES encryption. I'll continue to use Agilebits' 1Password app partly because it offers a Windows version, and I work on Windows and OS X machines, but OS X's new iCloud Keychain may be all you need if you stay inside the Apple ecosystem.

Some of us remember when Apple's old MobileMe service automatically provided synchronization features that disappeared when iCloud replaced it. Under Mavericks, iCloud now brings back a lot of that lost synchronization, and if you enter your account information for Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in one Mac running Mavericks, iCloud pushes the account info to all your other Macs running Mavericks. Incidentally, iCloud integration has been built into more of Apple's apps, so that Automator and the AppleScript Editor now let you store files in the cloud as TextEdit and Preview already did.

Tabs and Tags

Catching up with features formerly supplied only in third-party apps like PathFinder or TotalFinder, OS X's built-in Finder finally gets a tabbed interface, so you can say good-bye to the clutter of multiple Finder windows that probably filled your desktop in earlier versions. Tabs in the Finder work exactly as they do in Safari: Cmd-T (or the plus sign on the tab bar) opens a new tab, and Cmd-Tab switches between tabs. You can easily drag a file to another folder by dropping the on the other folder's tab, without opening a full view of the folder. As you'd expect, you can have two or more tabs displaying the same folder, with one tab showing a Cover Flow-style view and another showing a detailed list, or any other display option. The Finder, for the first time, gets the full-screen display option already available in many other Apple and third-party apps.

The other new Finder feature is Tags, which looks almost exactly like the old Labels feature but is far more powerful. You can attach one or more color-coded tags to any file, so that a photo, for example, can be tagged with both a blue "Work" tag and a red "Urgent" tag. By clicking a tag color in the Finder sidebar, you can display all the files tagged with that color. If you color-coded files with labels in earlier versions of OS X, those labels are automatically converted into tags. (By the way, it took me a while to figure out how to delete a tag that I no longer wanted to use: Ctrl-click the tag in the Finder's sidebar or on the Tags tab in the Finder's preference pane, and choose Delete from the menu.)